Dancer From the Dance: A Novel

AT 3
A.M
. WE WENT TO THE DISCOTHEQUE. THEN OUR DAY BEGAN...

I used to sit on the sofa at the Twelfth Floor and wonder. They were so attractive, these young men who disappeared night after night into the frenzied clubs of New York City.

They were tall, with handsome, open faces and strong white teeth, and they were all dead. They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only admission ticket was physical beauty. All else was classless: the Puerto Rican boy who passed out on Tuinols washed dishes at CBS, but the doctor bending over him had treated presidents.

It was a democracy such as the world—with its competition and snobbery—never permits, but which flourished in this little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building, because its central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love.

Labor is blossoming or dancing where

The body, is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

—
W
ILLIAM
B
UTLER
Y
EATS,

"Among School Children"

Midnight

The Deep South

Ecstasy,

It's finally spring down here on the Chattahoochee—the azaleas are in bloom, and everyone is dying of cancer. I am writing you very late at night. We have just one kerosene lamp, and the bugs outside are positively battering the screen at my elbow, trying to get at the light—like so many people we knew in New York trying to get Love,
n'est-ce pas?—
pushy, pushy, pushy.

I cannot tell you were I am, because I want to make a clean break with my former life. At this moment I know my apartment is rotting beneath a swarm of rat's and roaches; the woman downstairs is coughing her tubercular cough; the man next door is beating up his wife; the sound of canned laughter from an I Love Lucy rerun reverberates up the stairwell; the phone is ringing, and I do not care. I cannot go back. I would rather die like a beast in the fields, amigo, with my face to the moon and the empty sky and the stars, than go back; expire with the dew on my cheeks.

For example: At this instant a rust-red moon is hanging low above the water lilies on the lake, and the leaves of the live oaks gleam in its light. There is not a sound in the world except the ducks in the weeds that take up when the frogs die down. The egrets are nesting there, too, white egrets that, every afternoon at dusk, fly in great flocks to roost in the golden weeds, and after a long, hot day, we sit out under the trees to watch them and feel the breeze that comes up across the water. Everything is in bloom, azaleas and dogwood, the air is soft as talcum powder, so soft you can't imagine people dying here; you imagine them crumbling to death, like biscuits left out in the rain, biscuits and talcum powder and azaleas rotting beneath the bushes in drifts of petals—and at noon, dear, the odor of pine needles rises up from the earth when I walk through the woods, rises up and envelops me in a cloud, and one feels like swooning.

There are convicts along the roads down here, cutting the grass while a man with a rifle watches them; there are convicts and egrets and azaleas and rust-red moons, and water moccasins and pecan farms, and outside my window at this moment a brown thrasher sleeps by the nest he is building. He brings one twig at a time and then stands on the branch outside it, looking all around, guarding his work; it is fascinating, and so much nicer than those sooty pigeons. (How do they live in that filth up there? How did I?)

And the boys downtown who walk around in blue jeans and no shirts, lanky, long-limbed southern boys—and our Irish priest who just returned from the missions in Guinea! We go to mass every week and are quite active in church affairs. I am in love with him, and the mockingbirds and hot blue skies and intense white clouds under the noonday sun, and the pine trees that bristle in the heat, as if they were plugged into electric sockets, and the flies droning over the gardenias, and the red skies at dusk crossed by egrets flying low over the lake. At noon I lie in the hammock in our garden and listen to the mockingbirds carrying on high up in the live oaks and watch the cardinals dart through the Spanish moss.

I will tell you this much: We live on a farm near a small town filled with retired postmasters, most of whom are dying of cancer. Tomorrow Ramon and I are going over to the neighbors to help them install a septic tank. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be helping people install a septic tank, instead of listening to friends who call at three
A.M.
to tell me they're committing suicide. Americans are a practical people! We need practical problems. I would MUCH rather help someone install a septic tank than provide him with a reason for living—it is very easy to install a septic tank, but the latter is of course impossible. There are no Suicide Hotlines down here. If they want to end it all, they row out onto the lake, very early in the A
.M.
when the family is asleep, and blow their brains out where only the ducks can hear! Saves so many message units, don't you think?

Do write. We pick up our mail in Atlanta once a week, when Ramon goes up to buy fertilizer, pumps, and things like that—big girl stuff.

Agathe-Hélène de Rothschild

The Lower East Side

New York, N.Y.

Vision,

It was spring here, too, last week—Sunday afternoon I walked down the steps off Columbus Circle into Central Park, and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed. And down in your old neighborhood, darling, the bag ladies were sleeping outside again on the steps of the St. Marks Dispensary, and the whores were in hot pants, and the Polish men standing in front of your building in those dark suits & hats, as if they were waiting for a cortege to begin. EVeryone thought spring had come! And then it dropped thirty degrees in one afternoon, snowed the next morning, Bob was mugged on Ninth Street, and we are right back to a New York winter.

Flamingo had a White Party last night—two muscle numbers came in DIAPERS, Bob wore a sequined Halston top, the Baron Ambert was there, and two Egyptian women who were running around with Sutherland and who asked me if I thought they should paint their cunts! I told them that one should not draw attention to unpleasant things. Sutherland said the only reason he came was that he dared not defy the evening papers; Hobbs told him that a well-bred woman appears in print on only three occasions: her birth, marriage, and death. "Yes, darling," said Sutherland, "but I'm not
that
well-bred." The music was atrocious: that roller-skating music they're turning out now that discos are big business. It wasn't till six, when most everyone had gone, that he started to play the good stuff. Gene Harris sat on a banquette all night with a celestial Puerto Rican boy who was licking his arm every time I looked—I was ready to be taken to Bellevue.

So much for the life of the mind—I am in fact so depressed that last night while Bob Cjaneovic was sitting on my face, I began to think how futile life is, no matter what you do—it all ends in Death, we are given such a short time, and everything truly is, as Ecclesiastes says, Vanity, Vanity, Vanity. (Of course that only made me burrow deeper, but still—to have the thought.)

Perhaps that's why I walked out of Cadwalader, Wicker sham & Taft last month. It's true. I could not write another will, or letter of credit, or memorandum, so I've started to hook for a living. I'm very good. I can do it with anyone: old men, harelips. I give enemas, and one fellow who lives on Sutton Place just asks to smell my wet hair. THAT'S an easy hundred! I have one marvelous old guy who used to be a screenwriter, and knew EVeryone in Hollywood in the thirties, and during sex the phone rings and it's always Joan Fontaine!!

I'm also doing lots of jockstrap things, at fifty bucks a throw (less the price of the jockstrap, which they get to keep). I have a man on Sixty-fourth Street who pours Bosco and whipped cream into my jock while I stand there, and he jerks off!!

(There's a big market in stained underwear, and smelly jockstraps, I'm told, darling—could we make a killing!)

As for Sutherland, he spent yesterday in Bergdorfs IN FULL DRAG—in a Halston George smuggled out of the shop for him. He had the saleswomen bill his purchases to a house in East Hampton! Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Your first lover is very depressed; he thinks the West is being destroyed by the labor unions, that people no longer believe in anything, and the blacks have ruined the city, et cetera. Then he was mugged last night—by a white teenager—and spent the evening in Bellevue.

I myself was roughed up by three Serbo-Croatian security guards at the Plaza Hotel last night, where I went on a call. (And I thought these things only happened in East Germany!) I will not bore you with the rest of the story, except to say my left leg is now in a cast, and we're suing everyone.

So you see, you're missing nothing up here. Although everyone misses
you.
I have one more thing to tell you, more shocking than my new career, no doubt, and it's this: While recuperating from last night's "interrogation" I've started writing a novel that I want you to read. A gay novel, darling. About all of us. Would you, could you, give it a read?

Yours in Christ,

Madeleine de Rothschild

P.S.
I'm sorry everyone is dying of cancer, but be careful; I'm beginning to think cancer is contagious. I wouldn't want to lose you just yet.

Three o'clock

The Deep South

Madness,

I just finished scrubbing the church altar for the World Day of Prayer.

Please do send your novel on. This is the perfect place to read, and that is all I want to do with that life—read about it. One thing Ramon says is: Keep the chapters short. Ramon says no one has a very long attention span anymore, and that's why the world is so unhappy. (God knows it was true of
us.)

However, I must caution you, love: Those things may be amusing to us, but who, after all, wants to read about sissies? Gay life fascinates you only because it is the life you were condemned to live. But if you were a family man going home on the 5:43 to Chappaqua, I don't think you'd want to read about men who suck each other's wee-wees! Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don't want to know WHAT THEY DO. Canons of taste must be observed, darling. People are tired of hearing about sex, anyway. And the story of a boy's love for a boy will never capture the world's heart as the story of a boy's love for a girl. (Or a boy's love for his DOG—if you could tell
that
story again, this country would make you rich as Croesus!) Also you would have to make your novel very sad—the world demands that gay life, like the life of the Very Rich, be ultimately sad, for everyone in this country believes, down deep in their heart, that to be happy you must have a two-story house in the suburbs and a FAMILY—a wife and 2.6 kids and a station wagon and a big dog and an elm tree with a tire hanging from it on a rope. Please, darling, there is not
much
variation of opinion in this country, or any country, for that matter; the whole world wants to be like
My Three Sons.
So (a) people would puke over a novel about men who suck dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would demand it be ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give in to them?